News and Open Source Releases

The Solus project is planning to use Flatpak to provide ts users with quick access to third-party software and applications whose licenses prevent them from being included in the distribution's repositories. While both Snap and Flatpak were considered for the job, the Solus team chose the latter for several reasons: "Firstly, and very importantly to us, the so-called 'Chrome distribution issue' has already been conquered by Endless OS, utilizing Flatpak. On the other hand, this is still (to the best of my knowledge) at the prototype stage with Snaps. OK, let's not get hung up completely on a single example. From the perspective of integration, Snap (snapd and snapcraft) represents the biggest integration challenge. To correctly and fully integrate it would require modification of the build system (which disables networking by default for security!) to provide a full set of builds for the packages and their dependencies. Additionally, AppArmor (not used by Solus) is also required. On the other hand, integrating Flatpak into Solus was as trivial as packaging ostree and Flatpak, barring some minor changes which we're already upstreaming." Further information on the adoption of Flatpak and the problem Solus plans to solve with Flatpak packages can be found in the project's blog post.